


the hunger in me // knows the burning in you

by buckynatalia



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Flashbacks, Past Finn Collins/Raven Reyes, Raven Reyes-centric, Sharing a Room
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-22
Updated: 2016-03-27
Packaged: 2018-05-28 08:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6322213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckynatalia/pseuds/buckynatalia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU where Raven & Bellamy stay on the Ark. </p><p>Raven Reyes is grief-stricken and reckless, picking fights with bullies and leaving them bleeding. Bellamy Blake is dealing with the fallout of hiding his sister under the floor for 16 years, and is more than a little distracted by the pretty mechanic with bloody knuckles. With oxygen running out and panic rising rapidly, they find their way towards each other and towards whatever the universe has in store.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "the hunger in me  
> knows the burning in you.  
> i think you and i  
> were dreamed into being  
> by the same  
> long forgotten star.  
> i think you and i  
> should never be apart."  
> — Amrita C.

Here’s what I remember.

Fluorescent lights reflecting off the worn floor, dizzying and blue-white. My teeth were bared and I was beating the shit out of some irrelevant rich kid from Phoenix. A bloated bigot who had the nerve get in my face and call me a whore. All I did was reject him.

He said, no wonder I was alone. He said I should learn my place.

It felt good to hear the crunch of his nose breaking. The chemical release of violence coursing through my veins, numbness like from the pills my mother had loved so much. When he hit me back, knocking the breath out of me, bruising me where it wouldn’t show, I hardly even felt it.

The Phoenix kid wrapped his meaty hand around my neck, raising me off the floor. I gasped for air, scratching at his hands. He slammed me against a wall.

I noticed, as I dangled there, that there was something flat about his eyes. Something dull. Like there was a part of him that truly believed that he was entitled to whatever he wanted. Whoever he wanted.

So I didn't feel guilty when I shattered his kneecap.

*

Phoenix boy was reeling back, swearing, cradling his leg like it was a sick child. He rolled into the fetal position and I slumped to the floor. Gasping for air. The adrenaline was leaving my system, leaving me aching and empty.

I could have gotten up and left, then, leaving the asshole kid with a reminder to keep his mouth shut. But then I saw the shadow stretching across the floor.

A stranger’s low whisper of “holy shit,” and there he was. Standing above me and blocking out the glaring lights. The boy who’d been plastered across all the newsfeeds for months. Bellamy Blake looked out of place. A marble statue in a war zone.

Big brown eyes and hair falling into his face. A little older, a little wiser than the shocked teenager who had hid his sister under the floor for years. More lines in his face. He was helping me up and away from the boy sprawled on the floor. His hands were warm, but I didn’t care, I didn’t want to notice these things. I wanted to go home.

I told Bellamy to fuck off, I told him to stay out of my business. He didn’t flinch. He said that guards were already on their way. He asked if he could walk me home.

And so I let him.

*

By the time we’d circled around Mecha Station and gotten to my apartment door, I’d examined every inch of him. Half a foot taller than me, his gaze shifty and cautious. He certainly wasn’t the vacant-eyed boy I’d seen on my holopad six months ago.

I wondered, distantly, what it was like to have a sister. I wondered what it was like to lose her.

This much I knew: Bellamy Blake was real. And he was studying my face like I was some endlessly fascinating painting, or a goddamn historical text. This close, I could see the freckles on his nose. So close I caught the faint scent of bleach and flowery shampoo clinging to his clothes.

“Are you gonna be okay?” Bellamy asked me. He was looking at my hands. Good hands, I knew, capable of grafting and splicing and picking apart machinery. They were far from pretty, though. Split knuckles and someone else’s blood soaking my fingers.

“I’l be fine,” I said. He lingered just outside my doorway, not moving away and not moving closer. He was alone, and didn't want to be. He was kinder than he should have been, in these circumstances, and I think he hated himself for that. For his unrelenting gentleness.

Despite myself, I kind of liked him.

“Why did you help me?” I asked him. “You didn’t have to help me up, or walk me home, or warn me about the guards. You didn’t have to do any of that.”

He shrugged, eyes locking with mine. “There’s no reason not to.”

“That’s it? You’re the good samaritan now?”

“I just don’t want anyone else to get floated,” he said, his voice not gentle but somewhere close. “You beat that Phoenix kid's ass. Looked like you gave him a fractured kneecap, broken nose, probably a black eye. If the guards found you there, it’d be game over. No matter who was really at fault, you’d be the one they put in the airlock.” Bellamy bit his lip. “I don’t want that.”

“Thanks, then,” I said, so quietly I couldn’t have been sure that he heard me.

“Don’t mention it,” he murmured.

“I’m Raven, by the way.”

“Bellamy. Bellamy Blake.”

“I know,” I replied. “I’ve seen your name on the newsfeeds. You’re kind of famous now, Bellamy.”

“Only siblings left in the galaxy,” he said, just a little bitterly. “Or so I’ve heard.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to —”

“It’s okay.”

“I lost someone too,” I said. “Finn. He was in that dropship that they launched, sent to the ground with the rest of them. Radiation poisoning is better than suffocation, right? Maybe they’ll even get to breathe real air. Maybe they’ll see trees, you know, blue sky . . .That’s not a bad way to go.”

“That’s a nice thought,” said Bellamy. He paused, then said softly, “Do you believe that, Raven?”

“Not really. No.”

“I’m not sure that I do, either,” he said.

And when I looked up at him, he was looking at my lips with a vague sort of longing. Maybe he wanted to hear me speak more. Maybe he wanted to memorize the shape of them, the pink fullness, the way my lips parted ever so slightly whenever I was lost in thought.

I told him that he should stay.

And so he did.

________

 

When the door shut, I was there, pressing my mouth against his. Bellamy was still, at first. Then he melted, moved, said yes. Said, are you sure you want this? I was sure, and his hands were warm around my waist, moving all over me, unclipping my bra. His heart beat fast. I noticed how gentle Bellamy was, even when I was all scratch and pull and hitched breath.

And there was my bed, pushed into the corner. He sat at the edge of it, kicking off his boots, his jeans. Look what the tide brought in, that's a thing my no-good mom used to say.

“This isn’t how I thought today would go,” he breathed. I settled onto his lap, getting to work on the buttons of his shirt. I could feel the heat coming off of his skin. The smell of soap, and sweat.

“Somewhere else you’d rather be?” I asked him.

I was tugging the shirt off his shoulders, suddenly greedy. His hands around my waist, traveling across my skin like it was map. His lips met the soft place just under my jaw. He was taking his time.

I pushed him down onto the bed.

“Nowhere but here,” said Bellamy softly.

____

We lay in my big double bed with the worn-out springs and the broken slats, and Bellamy filled the empty dent in the pillow next to mine. His black curls spilling onto the sheet. His arms around me.

About an hour later, we realized that my hands were still bleeding. Red and dried to a crust, all over his chest and his hair and the sheets. It was a little funny. It was a little ironic how quickly I could move from inflicting pain to doing this. I kept thinking how the blood didn't look bad on him, like maybe he was meant to wear it.

He threw the sheets into the bathtub to be washed later. We can deal with it in the morning, he said. We.

Both of us sat in the tiny bathroom. Bellamy perched on the side of the bathtub, watching as I scrubbed the blood from my knuckles. A clean rag and lemon-scented soap, stinging in my open wounds. I watched the pink water swirling down the drain and I thought of all those rivers and creeks down on Earth. I wondered if floating in the water was a little bit like being on a spacewalk. I think I'd like to try it.

My knuckles healed in due time, scarring brown and uneven. Later, new skin came in shiny and pink. I heal too, if only more slowly. I put my raven necklace in the back of a drawer.

Some things are forgotten and some things are remembered.

It’s better this way.

________


	2. Chapter 2

Here’s what they never tell you about starting over: You can’t.

Once you love someone, they stay with you like a scar on your skin. They become an ugly insidious ache, no matter how much you loved them. They are the twinge in your joints after a bad fall. I still see Finn. A shadow of him, sticking to the back of my mind like some sort of residue. God knows I don’t believe in soulmates, but he was the only thing that kept me alive for years. There must be some sort of withdrawal, when someone so essential to you is suddenly gone. Muscle memory. Maybe I was still trying to unlearn the shape of Finn’s hands.

The days get dark again. The air is thin, but this doesn’t matter because my first panic attack hits me like a bullet and I can’t seem to breathe anyway. I lay on the floor of my bathroom for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Thinking that I’ll only ever be loved in passing.

Maybe it’s always been my fault.

Eventually I fall asleep on the cold hard linoleum, not noticing that the tear tracks on my cheeks have dried to salt.

___________

  
Bellamy comes over and shares his rations with me. I don’t argue. It’s good to have someone around, even if they’re just sitting on your bed and reading a tattered book of poetry. He actually wants to be here. I put my legs on his lap, and he props his book on my ankles. We fit together, like two puzzle pieces jammed into the wrong place by an impatient toddler.

Bellamy seems awfully smart. In another world he could have been a historian, a professor maybe, someone with a PHD and a nice little brownstone to go home to. Instead he grows up on a failing space station and he reads a dead man’s poetry to a touch-starved mechanic.

I like it this way. I get to know him by the details first: The line of his jaw, clenching up when he’s worried. Strong hands and unbroken skin. The way his voice gets low, gravelly almost, when he reads something especially good, or when he says my name.

“We’re just friends, right?” I asked him one day, sitting on the kitchen counter while he leafed through an ancient magazine. He glanced up at me. “Because I don’t really want anything else.”

“Yeah, okay, just friends.” He was watching me closer now. “Anything else you want me to know, Raven?”

“Yeah,” I said, sliding off the counter. “Keep it platonic. No nicknames.”

“Nicknames?” he echoed, smiling a little. “Like?”

“You know. Honey, sweetheart, princess . . . Don’t give me that shit.”

“You got it, babygirl.”

I threw a plastic bowl at him, and he laughed.

____

  
He still kisses me just as well, after that, leaves marks up and down my neck when I ask him to. They turn brilliant purple. When I’m alone, I press my fingertips into the bruises and feel them twinge with pain. This was real. I was real.

We eat together sometimes, splitting everything down the middle. He even gives me his sister’s old clothes, two pairs of tattered jeans and some soft gray dresses that smell of lavender and a stranger’s skin. I save them, in the back of my closet. They’re more gravestone than clothing, at this point, and I can’t bear to wear them.

A month later my left eye goes dark. Nothing there except phosphor, the imaginary expanse of space where my eyeball used to be. Half blind. I suppose it could have been worse.

When I tell Bellamy, he’s half sick with worry, telling me that I should see a doctor, maybe they can help, maybe they’ll do something. An hour later he’s holding my hand. It’s more reflex than intention, and he’s shoving through the crowded corridors. The medical bay is full of people, clamoring for attention, some of them holding children, some of them hardly able to stand. It’s worse than I thought. The oxygen really is running out.

We wait in line for forty minutes. I sit slumped against the wall, Bellamy standing, pacing the length of the hall. Eventually someone tells him brusquely that he needs to sit down, he’s stressing everyone out. He sits beside me on our narrow place on the floor, our shoulders brushing, his hand on mine.

Bellamy’s eyes are fixed on the ceiling and every once in a while, his lips will start moving. He might be praying, I don’t know, but I don’t think he believes in anything like that. Somewhere near my elbow, a little girl coughs. She’s snapping a pink barrette between her fingers. Click. Click. Click.

“Raven Blake,” a harried-looking nurse called out, scanning her clipboard. “We’re ready to see you now.”

“It’s Raven Reyes,” I corrected her, getting to my feet.

“Well, there must have been a misunderstanding. You were checked in as Blake.”

“That’s not—”

“Listen,” said the nurse, clearly exhausted. “Do you want to get in now, or do you want to wait another hour?”

“I’ll go now,” I said, glancing over at Bellamy. He pulled me into a hug, a quick one-armed thing. A brief moment of warmth and then the chilly medical bay was pulling me under.

“Go,” he said.

I kept thinking of the name, Raven Blake, almost ugly in it’s bluntness. I must have mixed up the emergency contact forms and the sign-in sheet, earlier.

I followed the nurse, past the plastic curtain dividing the corridor from the medical bay, into the huge room smelling of disinfectant. Every hospital bed is full. Everything is in motion. I look over my shoulder and see Bellamy as I walk away, his figure warped by the plastic screen. He was something out of a surrealist painting.

I sit on an operating table covered in green vinyl.

Dr. Griffin looks tired as she checks my pulse, then flicks a little flashlight into both of my eyes. She asks me to read some letters from a tablet. Right eye is stellar, an overperformer. Left eye is still dead in it’s socket.

“There’s severe ocular nerve damage,” she said. “Looks like a side effect of oxygen deprivation.”

“So? Can you fix it?” She shook her head. “No, I’m afraid I can’t. Just get lots of rest, to save your right eye from straining too much.”

“No shit,” I said. “I’m half blind, Dr. Griffin, and you’re telling me I should just sleep more?”

“Yes. That’s all you can do,” said the doctor. She gestured vaguely in the direction that I’d come from. “All those people you saw in the corridor, they’re experiencing similar things. It’s the decline in air quality. There’s not enough good oxygen to go around.” Dr. Griffin sighed, then wiped her hands on her pants. “Go home, Raven. Spend time with your family.”

“Don’t have one,” I said, sliding off the table. Her mouth opened and closed, as if she was going to say something, an apology maybe. But she didn't. She studied my face, and then glanced away quickly like I was the sun and might burn her eyes. I knew that I wasn't the first patient in here, and I was far from the last. Dr. Griffin was going to have a very long day. “Goodbye, doc.”

"Goodbye, Raven.”

I left her there, in the big cold room with the sick children and their hopeful wheezing parents. If I hadn't left so soon, I would have seen Dr. Griffin looking at the dent I’d left on the foam table. She stood there for a long time, remembering her own child, a sunny-eyed Phoenix kid who was only a memory by now.

_____

  
When I walk away from the medical bay, there's a little girl staring at me in the way that only small children can. She's small for her age. Not malnourished or neglected like I was, but it's obvious that she grew up on the poorer side of the Ark. Narrow shoulders and a gap between her two front teeth. There's a doll clutched to her chest, a hideous naked barbie with long glossy legs.

I give her a small wave, which she doesn't return. I don't blame her. Stranger danger, right?

When I walk away, I feel her eyes following me. Maybe it's just my imagination, but I think the back of my neck prickles with the weight of her gaze. Maybe she recognized me from somewhere. I knew that sometimes when I was out on a spacewalk, the little children in the schoolrooms rushed to the windows to watch me work. I was almost mythical to them: the girl who floated more than once.

I wonder, vaguely, if this little girl will live past her childhood. There's a chance that she won't live out the year. But then, there's a little bit of sweetness in the thought of staying young forever. Reassuring, almost. It's kind of like immortality. Bellamy still remembers his sister as a child, sixteen and wide-eyed. In death, you'll remain innocent forever.

I push this thought out of my mind.

Bellamy finds me two minutes later, pushing his way through the crowd. He touched my shoulder, gently. "How'd it go?”

I shook my head. "It's bad. There's nothing the doctors can do.”

"That's bullshit," he said, looking past me. His eyes were desperate. "There has to be —"

"There's not," I said, cutting him off. "I've asked. It's just too late.”

"I'm sorry," said Bellamy, watching me closely. Maybe he's expecting me to lose it, collapse to the floor or try to sob into his chest. He's more worried than I was, honestly. Every so often he'd look down at my hands, hanging slack at my waist. Maybe he's expecting me to punch someone.

"It could have been worse," I said, feeling very small in that moment. Maybe it was the closeness, the flowing current of bodies brushing past us, but I felt almost delirious. We stood close to the wall. Bellamy's back to the crowd, so close that I could count the freckles on his nose. There was a sick twist in my stomach, all of a sudden. I realized how much he cared. Bellamy actually gave a shit. If I were to die today, disappear in the middle of the night, he would miss me.

We walked away from the bleach smell and the sick little girl, fleeing the crush of other people’s bodies.

I realize that I’d been holding my breath.

__

  
“Could I kiss you?” asked Bellamy, once we get to my door. There was people walking past, every so often, ordinary families with half-familiar faces. A little boy was tugged along by his hand. Someone else had their hair pinned up with an assortment of plastic forks and knives. I had to crane my neck to look Bellamy in the eye. “I’d kind of like to."

“Then do it," I said, my hands curling against his chest.

So he does. His lips aren’t soft but they’re warm, and Bellamy tasted like a promise that won’t be kept. There is nothing scary about kissing him, nothing out of the ordinary. Almost like a first love. A crush. His hand cups my face, gently, and right then it’s easy to imagine a future in which I am not alone.

  Bellamy’s smiling a little, when he pulls away. "You're a good friend, Raven," he said.

  And right then, that was enough.

__


End file.
